


I'm Ugly but I Glow in the Dark

by Hecate



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-18
Packaged: 2018-02-13 17:22:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2158890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/pseuds/Hecate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Argent women were knives lying around. And people kept on running into them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Ugly but I Glow in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by Glitterburn, thank you. / Disclaimer: Not mine, no money made.

Kate was born dangerous. That's what her father used to tell her at least, his smile glinting like a knife between his lips. The truth was that giving birth to her nearly killed Kate's mother. He seemed to think that was close enough. She always thought it was a bad joke. The kind of bad joke only hunters would tell. She heard a lot of those. She made them, too. 

(She finished what she’d started when she was a baby a few months after she turned 16; her mother's eyes turning yellow and her mother's gun shaking in Kate's hand. She was dangerous then. It lasted for a few seconds.

Her father told her it was enough.

She never believed him.)

She grew up in a world of hunters, guns and bows and knives, and she learned to be dangerous through the years and through the losses. It didn't come easily to her, not at first; she was a bad shot and she tended to blink before she pulled the trigger. But she learned because her mother loved her (used to love her) and her father was a strict and demanding teacher. In the end, there wasn't a choice, no other end for her. Not when it came to this. She was a hunter, after all.

She was an Argent.

Kate learned because of the monsters in the world and because her mother died. She learned because she was born angry, kicking and screaming like every other kid. But most of these children stop after a time. 

She never did.

She grew even more furious through the years, seeing bodies torn to shreds, seeing families destroyed. Her rage shaped her just like her father did; they were grindstones and she was a knife, turning sharp and shiny. And then she kept her eyes open as she aimed and her hands stopped shaking.

(Her father was so very proud.)

When Victoria told her she was pregnant, Kate hoped for a boy. Argent women had always been cursed with ugly responsibilities and early deaths. Argent women were knives lying around. 

And people kept on running into them.

Her mother was different. Her mother liked Talia Hale, spoke of her with respect. Kate always remembered that, no matter matter how many years passed. Her mother's calm voice and her little smile, her father's anger. 

Her mother liked a Hale. Kate liked a Hale, too, a tiny bit, her fondness a cherished aberration that made her different to the rest of the hunters. Made her special. A fondness she always knew she had to get rid of.

(She was her mother's daughter.

But she didn't want to die like her.)

Years after her mother, Kate learnt something new, something beautiful: It was easier to set a fire than pulling a trigger, easier and so very right. Because monsters needed to burn, all these villagers in books and movies were right about that; and the heat of the flames reminded Kate of her mother's hand warm against her skin, of her arms around her. But she knew, she always knew, if her mother could have seen the fire, she'd think her cruel. Kate didn't care.

She visited Peter in the hospital once not long after his home burned. She took in his face, a ruin just like the Hale house and yet so empty of pain and everything else. She could have killed him. Should have. But she didn't.

Her father called it mercy and sneered at it. She knew it to be something else, something sharper, and it sounded like her laughter when her father talked about Peter. He always stared at her whenever she laughed. As if she was some strange animal, a specimen he could analyse once he’d pinned it to a slide of glass and put it under a microscope. As if he wasn't used to hearing her laugh.

She left her father soon after the fire. 

She never missed him. But then, Kate never missed much. Sometimes she wasn't even sure if she truly missed her mother or if all she did was copying the grief that she knew from the world surrounding her. That strange world other people called ordinary where wolves never walked on two feet and hunters never turned into what they hunted. 

It wouldn't have surprised her. Hunters always know how to make themselves look like everybody else, ordinary and plain. And grief might be the most ordinary thing in the world apart from love. And she was great at faking that.

She left her father but she never stopped hunting. She never got to do that.

She is in the cleaning business, she used to tell the men who flirted with her in seedy bars. They laughed at her, imaging her on her knees scrubbing toilets. “I'm the CEO of the company,” she sometimes said, smiling widely.

'I'm cleaning the world from the monsters,' she thought.

Later, once they climbed off her, sated and tired, she still smiled. She asked them about their families and she never called them packs, never pulled away when she saw eyes too blue or eyes too red. She had practise, after all.

She killed them while they slept.

Kate never left a trace in their apartments, no hair and no fingerprints. She was in the cleaning business, after all. She knew how to clean away the dirt. She just never knew how to clean up her own messes. But then, she had always been pretty sure that no one did. Her mother's death taught her that. 

Still, she came to her brother's aid. It was his town and his problem, but there was hunting and there was Allison. She always cared about Allison, and hunting was all Kate ever knew. She told Allison about the monsters in the world, did what her brother refused to do. Allison would not die a clueless and stupid death; she would become too strong and too fast for what was out there. Kate owed her that. They all did. 

For a while Kate thought she would be the one to teach her.

But Peter killed her. 

Kate wasn't surprised. Not when she fell and not when she woke up. It had always been Peter in one way or another, that blink of something at the edge of her vision and self. He had always been burning under her skin and in her fire. 

That's why she never touched him, never went after him. 

(She liked a Hale. She never loved one.)

She woke up in a prison of dirty walls, tiles and pipes. She woke up and was different, a new current running through her body, like fire and like pain. It made her think of the Hale house, crumbling so easily as if it had been built for that moment.

It reminded her of pulling the trigger on her mother.

They told her to end it; they told her to follow the code. 'That would be a first,' she thought, and wondered if those people ever really talked to her father, if they truly understood what he was saying when he talked about hunting or his family. Her father never followed the code. And she never knew how.

She breathed into her body, into the new ache of it, and thought of Allison and remembered Peter's claw against her throat. There were monsters in the world. She killed her mother because of that. Because it was her job, because it was what her father taught her. He made her in his image. She never changed, just kept on reflecting him until she couldn't see how her smile resembled her mother's, until she didn't smile much at all.

She smashed the mirror.

And lived.

Lives.


End file.
